Machine translation refers to a job that converts a given sentence to be translated, that is, a source sentence into a translated sentence, that is, a target sentence using translation resources such as translating knowledge or rules and algorithms. A system that performs the machine translation job is referred to as a machine translating system. In many translation cases, a conjugatable word which corresponds to a predicative word in a sentence may be variously interpreted to have different meanings depending on surrounding contexts. For example, in case of an English word “prevent”, the Korean translation may be varied depending on an object as follows. Here, the conjugatable word includes a verb exemplified in English and a verb and an adjective exemplified in Korean.
For example, an English sentence of “You cannot prevent their getting married.” is translated into a Korean sentence of “.” In contrast, in another example, an English sentence of “prevent flu from spreading” is translated into a Korean sentence of “”
In other words, “prevent” is usually used as a meaning of “stop” or “inhibit” but when a disease is used as an object, it is more natural to translate “prevent” to have a meaning of “avoid”. As described above, since in many cases, the translation of the conjugatable word is varied depending on the surrounding contexts, it is easier to translate a sentence by combining a conjugatable word and the surrounding words as one pattern as compared with the translation of individual conjugatable words. Further, in case of English and Korean pair whose language families are different, since the locations of sentence components such as a subject, a predicative word, and an object are different, the information thereof are important factors in translation.
A verb phrase translation pattern is obtained by patterning translation information on a predicate and main arguments of a sentence such as “X prevent Y, X() Y() ” or “X prevent disease, ” and used as important information in machine translation.
A method of constructing a verb phrase pattern according to a related art uses a specific language pairs as a target. In the method of constructing a verb phrase pattern, a verb phrase pattern for a native language and a target language is constructed first, and then translated word is tagged thereto. Therefore, the language pair is limited and a verb phrase translation pattern may be automatically constructed.
More specifically, the method of constructing a verb phrase pattern according to a related art uses an English corpus, an English WordNet, and a translation dictionary for aligning words in addition to an English-Korean parallel corpus in order to construct a verb phrase pattern database for English-Korean translation. In other words, the method constructed an English verb phrase pattern database using English corpora in advance. The method tagged meaning information of an argument using a word net with respect to the argument of a verb phrase in a verb phrase pattern and aligned translated words of words configuring a sentence using bilingual parallel corpus and an electronic dictionary. And the method constructed the verb phrase translation pattern, while ambiguity in translated words of elements configuring the verbal phrase pattern is resolved using a sense vector and a Korean local context.
However, the related art has a limitation that only a Korean verb phrase translation pattern with respect to an English verb phrase is constructed. Further, in order to tag translation information for individual elements of the English verb phrase pattern, an English-Korean translation dictionary is required. Further, in order to resolve an ambiguity of translated words, a parallel corpus and an electronic dictionary are used to heuristically align words and corresponding Korean local contexts are used to configure a sense vector to resolve ambiguity of the translated word. However, the Korean translation pattern constructed above is incomplete.